Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Inside the Savoy, the eight terrorists, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and grenade launchers, placed a series of explosive devices around the room where they were holding the eleven hostages. (Another eight civilians were hiding elsewhere in the hotel.) They threatened to kill them all unless twenty Palestinian prisoners were released within four hours.

  In addition, although almost two years had passed, the Palestinians announced that their raid was retaliation for Operation Spring of Youth.

  Negotiations continued through the night, conducted through one of the hostages, a resourceful young Arabic-speaking woman named Kochava Levy, who gave the Israelis much valuable information on what was happening inside the hotel. She also persuaded the terrorists to allow her to take a badly wounded German tourist, who’d lost a leg in the exchanges of fire and was lying in the hotel lobby, out of the building, and although she could have stayed outside, she bravely went back in to help with the negotiations.

  But Israel never had any intention of releasing the Palestinian prisoners. Instead, while the Israeli negotiator stalled for time, a Sayeret Matkal force plotted a rescue operation. At 5:16 A.M., forty-four commandos stormed the hotel. They killed seven of the terrorists and later captured one. But only eleven of the hostages were rescued. Eight civilians were killed when the terrorists realized they were under attack and detonated the charges. Three soldiers were also killed, including a staff officer who was a former commander of the unit and had followed the raiding party into the hotel.

  This was seen as yet another significant failure in a seemingly endless cycle. “It was a terrible time,” said Omer Bar-Lev, a Sayeret Matkal soldier who took part in the raid on the hotel and rose to become the unit’s commander. “Every few weeks we scrambled in the middle of the night and were put on a chopper to go to the scene of another terror attack. You knew that in the few hours you had before dawn, you had to eliminate the problem. Although it was all happening inside Israel, the nature of the operations was different from what the unit was used to—all the initiative, all of the element of surprise, all the planning was the other side’s. Terribly scary.”

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  WITH THE ATTACKS CONTINUING unabated, it was clear that Israel needed to redouble its efforts to eliminate the PLO leadership. But even when Bayonet was functioning at full strength, the Mossad had found it difficult to operate in target countries such as Lebanon, where the heads of the Palestinian terror organization lived. Moreover, security precautions had tightened up considerably after Operation Spring of Youth. Using Mossad operatives to eliminate the PLO leadership was now seen as impractical, if not impossible.

  Instead, Israel turned to its air force. In mid-August 1975, a Mossad mole inside Fatah reported that the PLO was planning a rally in a stadium, Al-Madina al-Riyadiyyah, in south Beirut, on October 1, and that one hour before that rally the entire Fatah leadership would be meeting in a nearby office. This was seen as an ideal opportunity to get rid of Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Farouk Kaddoumi, Hani al-Hassan, Wadie Haddad, and many other senior officials all at once. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered that a plan be drawn up immediately.

  While the chief of staff and the air force were in favor of an attack, the head of AMAN, General Shlomo Gazit, vigorously opposed it. “I told Defense Minister Shimon Peres that we must not get involved in something open like this. I was prepared to combat terrorism with full force, but only in clandestine operations that did not leave a calling card. There were some Israelis who were not ashamed of the targeted killings. My attitude was the opposite: I was ashamed. I sat quietly and didn’t brag about them.”

  His objections were overruled, and planning began. Major Aviem Sella, then a rising star in the air force, was appointed to coordinate the operation. Eight A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft and one F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber were scheduled to take part. Helicopters were readied in case any pilot was shot down or crashed and needed rescue. Everything was going according to plan.

  Then, on the morning of the operation, the weather report came in. The forecast was for heavy clouds over Beirut. Because the Israelis’ bombs at that time lacked precise, all-weather guidance mechanisms, there would be no certainty of hitting the target. “But it was so inviting, so once-in-a-lifetime,” Major Sella said. “And all those vast preparations—a large part of the air force was on operational footing. We decided to give it a go. I told Benny [Peled, commander of the air force], ‘Come on, let’s take a chance—send the planes up and maybe a miracle will happen.’ ”

  The pilots took off, hoping that the skies would clear. The skies didn’t oblige, and clouds were still covering Beirut when they reached the city.

  But Sella “had not taken into account the motivation of the pilots,” as he later acknowledged. The pilots had been ordered not to drop their bombs if they couldn’t see the target, but that still gave them a significant amount of discretion. They knew the nature of the target and grasped how important it was to Israel that the PLO’s leaders be eliminated.

  The pilots dived under the cloud cover to a lower altitude than their orders permitted. When they saw they were over the target, they released their bombs, which contained an arming device operated by a cable connected to the aircraft. But since they were flying lower than they were supposed to, the fuses remained unarmed, and the bombs fell onto the ground and the roofs of buildings without going off, “like a batch of abandoned eggs,” in Sella’s words.

  Only Abu Jihad’s driver was killed in the air raid, crushed by one of the undetonated bombs. The next day, a Beirut newspaper ran a cartoon showing a Palestinian boy peeing on an Israeli bomb. Abu Jihad ordered an investigation to find out who had leaked the intel about the meeting. Three months later, another Mossad asset was exposed and executed.

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  WHILE FATAH WAS NOW concentrating its terror activities inside Israel, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine kept up its murderous attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad, particularly in Europe. The PFLP bombed synagogues, Israeli legations, and El Al offices. Its militants hijacked planes flying to Israel, a technique in which they had grown quite skillful.

  George Habash was still the leader of the PFLP, but the organization’s most brilliant operational mind belonged to Habash’s deputy, Wadie Haddad.

  “He had a virtuoso talent for clandestine transportation of explosives to the site of an attack and their concealment there,” said Ilan Mizrahi, who ran agents inside Haddad’s organization. “He preferred quality operations, sometimes far away, after careful planning,” said Shimshon Yitzhaki, the Mossad’s counterterror chief. “The training he gave his men at a base in South Yemen was of a different league from what we were used to.”

  Others admired Haddad’s professionalism as well. The KGB, which gave him the code name Nationalist, granted him generous assistance in order “to reach some of our own objectives through the activities of the PLFP while maintaining the necessary secrecy,” as the head of that agency, Yuri Andropov, wrote to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in 1969. Haddad eliminated Soviet defectors and attacked targets connected to the CIA, and in return he received funding, training, advanced weaponry, and intelligence from the KGB and the Stasi.

  Haddad was independent and resolute. When Habash announced internally that he was weighing compliance, even “only temporarily,” with Arafat’s request that terrorist acts outside the Middle East be put on hold, Haddad declared that Habash could do as he pleased but that he and his men would carry on in their own way.

  For many long years, Haddad planned a major attack, one that would shock the world. He invested much time in the planning and intelligence gathering but kept on postponing it because of various operational snags. One of the most difficult challenges was that he needed to find operatives who looked European. In mid-1975, the solution cropped up.

  The PLO had excellent ties with a number of militant extre
me left-wing organizations in Europe and had even set up training camps for them in Lebanon and South Yemen, which had close ties with the Soviet Union and took an extreme anti-Israeli line.

  Haddad was on especially good terms with West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Its members espoused an anarchist-Marxist ideology and practiced urban guerrilla tactics against Germany’s law enforcement and big businesses. They saw Israel, with its oppression of the Palestinians, as another front in the war against the evils of imperialism.

  Two RAF members, Thomas Reuter and Brigitte Schulz, who had just been released from prison, slipped out of Germany and turned up at a PFLP training camp near Aden, where they joined up with other RAF comrades. These were the Westerners Haddad needed.

  Three of the PFLP’s own men were ordered to wait outside the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, for an incoming El Al airplane while the two Germans watched the airline’s counter in the terminal to ascertain the final arrival time of the flight and to alert the squad waiting outside.

  Immediately after the plane flew over them, the PFLP men were supposed to shoot it down with Strela SAM 7 shoulder-borne missiles.

  In the two months before the operation, the men had practiced firing Strelas and studied sketches of the Nairobi airport made by PFLP operatives who had conducted a preliminary reconnaissance. Together, they identified an area outside and slightly west of the airport, studded with clumps of tall trees and cactuses, between the main Mombasa Road and the fence of Nairobi National Park. From this spot, there was a clear line of sight to the airport’s runway.

  A week before the operation, two Strelas supplied to Haddad by the KGB were smuggled into Kenya. The eight members of the squad had entered Kenya separately, with forged passports, nine days before, and they checked into a hotel downtown.

  Everything was ready for the attack, but the Mossad had gotten wind of the plot through the Junction agent Sadness.

  An argument broke out inside the agency, with the head of Junction, Shmuel Goren, wanting more than anything else to protect Sadness and fearing that if the Mossad revealed the details of the planned attack to the Kenyan authorities and assisted them in thwarting it, Haddad’s group would realize that the Mossad was running an agent with access to its secrets. That could have spelled the end of Sadness. Goren proposed foiling the plot using “Hebrew labor”—i.e., targeted killings of the perpetrators by Bayonet—“without sharing it with the locals.”

  On the other side, the head of the Mossad’s foreign relations division, Nahum Admoni, who had been in charge of the agency’s Africa operations for a long time and knew President Jomo Kenyatta and his intelligence chiefs well, vigorously opposed carrying out such an action under the noses of “the locals.”

  There were also operational considerations: Bayonet had only just begun to reorganize after the disastrous Lillehammer affair, and “we felt that to handle several people simultaneously, while they were holding missiles in their hands, could be too complicated,” said former Mossad official Eliezer Tsafrir.

  Yitzhak Hofi, an ex-general who had taken over as Mossad director from Zamir in 1974, was visiting his CIA counterparts at Langley and was informed there about the developments. He sent an encoded message to Rabin with his recommendation: to collaborate with the Kenyan authorities and not to use Bayonet.

  “The principle had not changed—if someone kills a Jew, his blood be on his own head,” said Yitzhaki. “But it’s impossible to bump people off every day. Targeted killings entail a severe risk to your own people and the danger of fouling up relations with the country where you carry them out—in this case, Kenya. In operations, the rule is not to do unnecessary things. You have a target, execute a clean op. Forget everything else. Our supreme goal was to make sure nothing would happen to the El Al plane, and at the same time to protect the security of our source as fully as possible.”

  So instead of attempting to kill the terror squad, the Israelis enlisted the help of Kenya’s security forces. On Friday, January 23, 1976, late at night, a team of seventeen Israelis flew out of Israeli Air Force Base 27, headed for Nairobi. The operation was code-named Heartburn. “There was great anxiety,” recalled Tsafrir, who was a member of the team on the plane. “So many lives at stake, depending on us and the success of the operation.”

  As soon as the Israeli team landed, Admoni met with Kenyan intelligence agency officers to inform them of the impending attack. The Kenyans were shocked. President Kenyatta was particularly incensed when he grasped that Somalia was involved. The Kenyans willingly agreed to cooperate—they were pleased that the Mossad wasn’t acting on its own under their noses. They did insist on knowing the identity of the Mossad’s sources, in order to be sure that they were about to act on the basis of reliable information, but Admoni politely declined.

  A combined Mossad-Kenyan team soon located the Germans and the Palestinians and placed them under close surveillance. They also located the white minibus, with license plate KPR338, in which the missiles had been deposited. Later, the team followed the three Palestinians when they drove out to scout the launch site.

  On January 25, El Al Flight LY512 was due to take off from Johannesburg en route to Tel Aviv. The plane, a Boeing 707 with some 150 people on board, was scheduled to stop off in Nairobi at 5 P.M. Shortly before, the three Palestinians and the two Germans set out in their white minibus and another rental vehicle. Their first stop was to drop off the Germans at the terminal. Then they left the airport and got onto the main road, before turning right onto the dirt track in the direction of the planned launch site. But before they could reach it, Kenyan secret service operatives charged the group; immediately after that, they picked up the two Germans near the El Al counter in the terminal. All five surrendered without a struggle.

  Thus far, the Kenyans had been completely cooperative with the Israelis, but they didn’t want anything to become public, fearing the heavy Arab pressure they’d have to face in Third World and African forums if the affair came to light. They suggested two solutions: “Either we take them to the desert and feed them to the hyenas for lunch,” or the Israelis could have them, with the understanding that they would never disclose that the prisoners were in their hands.

  The Israelis hoped they’d be able to extract from the prisoners more information on Haddad and his activities, so they chose the second option: to effectively “disappear” the terrorists by whisking them off to Israel, where they would be held in isolation under extreme conditions and then face a secret trial. This was perhaps the first case of the West being involved in an activity that, after 9/11, the CIA would call “rendition”—the clandestine, undocumented, extrajudicial transfer of suspects from one country to another.

  Interrogators from AMAN’s Unit 504 and the unit’s medical officer flew to Nairobi. The five prisoners were tied to stretchers and sedated before the six-hour flight to Israel.

  Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, some were reconsidering the wisdom of bringing the prisoners to Israeli land. General Rehavam Zeevi, the prime minister’s counterterror and intelligence adviser, proposed an alternative to Yitzhak Rabin: “Let’s drop the five righteous souls into the Red Sea and get rid of the problem,” he said. “The Kenyans have kept quiet about the whole story. Nobody knows they’ve been caught. We have information that Wadie Haddad promised them that if they were captured, he’d hijack a plane to get them released. If we bring them to Israel and it gets out, it will only spark another wave of terror against us. Let’s finish it off now.”

  Rabin looked at Zeevi and remained silent for a long while. Then he told an aide to convene an urgent meeting of the cabinet forum on targeted killings.

  “What do you say?” Rabin asked the assembled ministers after they’d listened to Zeevi’s proposal. They all agreed that bringing the five prisoners to Israel would endanger Israeli travelers everywhere in the world. Haddad was a seasoned hijacker who would
do what he could to free his people. Rabin also agreed with this assessment but nevertheless refused to sign off on the execution of the sedated prisoners “unless the attorney general also agrees,” he said. “Call Aharon in now.”

  Aharon Barak, who would later become chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court and the country’s most renowned jurist, listened in silence to a description of the secret operation and the proposal to dump the perpetrators into the sea. “Have you finished?” he asked Zeevi when his exposition was over. “That’s good,” he said angrily, “because I think you must be insane. These are two German citizens you want to kill while they are tied up and sedated on an Israeli military plane. I cannot by any means approve of this.”

  The three Palestinians and two Germans landed safely in Israel and were taken to Unit 504’s secret interrogation facility in a base code-named Stalk, southeast of Tel Aviv. They were placed in dark cells with bare walls, receiving doses of sedatives all the while. As they began to wake up, “we decided to play ghost games with them,” says the head of the Shin Bet interrogation division, Arieh Hadar. “We put on masks and wailed while they were coming to, as if they had died and were in the world hereafter.”

  The Israelis were very eager to learn as much as they could about the structure and methods of the PFLP, and perhaps even something about where Wadie Haddad could be found.

  The senior 504 interrogator, Y., an officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel who sported the skullcap of an Orthodox Jew and was known for being a political right-winger, was put in charge of the three Palestinians. Y. was the man who ran the POW drills for the IDF’s special-ops forces, with their simulation of harsh captivity conditions and torture. Shortly before the arrival of the Nairobi five, he had caused a permanent spinal injury to a Sayeret Matkal man by striking him with a baton. A few months after that, one of the Palestinians who’d been under Y.’s interrogation collapsed and was rushed to a hospital, where he died.